Noel Larsen of Tasmanian Feijoa Temptations has big plans for feijoas in the coming years

Noel Larsen has been farming feijoas for five years at Tasmanian Feijoa Temptations and is believed to be the only person farming the product in Tasmania.

"We're trying to promote the feijoa in a state where they're not a well known fruit and we want to get this amazing fruit out to the public," Mr Larsen said.

"You eat it a bit like a Kiwi fruit, where you scoop the pulp out of the hard flesh, they are very, very sweet.

"There's hints of pineapple, strawberry, and maybe a bubblegum flavour depending on the type of fruit that you get.

"We have gone through the process of growing them from scratch. We've tried to pick the good varieties that will fruit really well and different trees have different flavoured fruit, so we've aimed for the better quality fruiting trees to get the volume out there.

"The picking season runs for about 10 weeks but the important thing is to wait for the fruit to drop on the ground, a lot of people try to pick them when they are not ready yet.

"A lot of people actually have them in their yards and aren't aware of how amazing the fruit is, if they pick the fruit off the tree, they are not amazing but if you actually let nature do its thing and let them drop on the ground, the flavour changes significantly," he said.

The fruit picking season has just finished and Mr Larsen said they managed to pick around 400 kilograms of the fruit per week.

"We generally go from around the start of May. They are a winter fruit, and especially here, there are not a lot of great winter fruits around this time of the year, so it's a good product to get out there and they are incredibly healthy.

"We sit on 13 acres here, there are about five of those acres wrapped up in the orchard and we are aiming to get to over 1000 trees. We sit on 550 at the moment.

"Our trees have pretty much doubled every year since we have put them in the ground, and our trees should get to around two and a half metres tall, and a two metre circumference, so they produce around 100 to 200 kilograms of fruit per tree through a season.

RELATED READING

"It's a family operation. My wife and two children all help go through the process of picking the fruit, packing the fruit and getting it out to market, and we are trying to get that to happen as quickly as we can so that the market has the time to process that fruit and get it out there.

"The trees are quite demanding so we do a lot of feeding of the trees, they need a lot of water through the summer months to get the food to develop," he said.

Mr Larsen said the fruit had a number of health benefits and had partnered with Miners Gold Brewery to create a feijoa beer. He also outlined his future plans for the fruit.

"They create an amazing feijoa sour, which is a very unique fruity beer. It's a low alcohol content beer so you can enjoy it through the summer months and hopefully it becomes a popular drink for people.

"It's just a matter of getting them out there to the public and having the public try this fruit because they are fantastic and a lot of people haven't tried them, so that's our biggest project, getting them out there," Mr Larsen said.

Sign up here to Good Fruit and Vegetables weekly newsletter for all the latest horticulture news each Thursday...